Archives for March 2021

Monday March 15, 2021

Trevor Noah did a great job as MC for The Grammys. I read headlines that some artists weren’t attending out of some sort of protest about something. Yeah, well, to quote Whoopie, “O.K.”

Due to Covid the show was stripped down, which made it quite nice. There were some artists who performed who actually sang, in tune, to music, with words that all matched and made sense. Very weird. Then there were some that did something else. What that was I can’t really say, or maybe I can and prefer not to say, not sure.

I think my downhill slide began when my wife asked me if I knew what ‘WAP’ stood for. Wop yes, WAP no. So I looked it up. It’s the title to a song by Megan Thee Stallion (not her real name, who knew?) Then I looked up the lyrics. I am glad for once that a rap performance says words so fast that you can’t understand them. Or as Trevor Noah put it, “If you have kids in the room tell them it’s about washing a cat.”

Old Megan won Artist of the Year. What? She was accompanied up on stage by Beyoncé, who was doing her best impression of Mariah Carey “can you see my cleavage?” haberdashery. I’ll say this about B (everyone in the know calls her B you know.) She makes a visual impression. If there is anything about her artistry that I like it is that ability. Her music? Her singing? It’s okay, but Adele would blow her off the stage.

Beyoncé made history by winning more Grammys than any other artist ever. What? Are you serious? I’ve watched some of her big numbers at previous Grammys and they are spectacular – visually, but then she has to sing, and she ain’t no Whitney Houston. 

So I don’t get it. My nephew would try to explain it by blurting out, “You’re old.” 

Yeah, Ha ha. When I was your age …

Many of the artists I have seen on SNL or heard at the Grammys this year or before, and for many years I have to say, “I don’t get it.” 

I think HER (not her real name) has a cool vibe, but singing? Eh.

Billie Eilish similar, but in a different way.

One is jazzy; one is other worldly ethereal.

But there is something to what they do that is interesting. Intriguing.

Then we get to Megan thee Stallion (not her real name.) I guess she thought putting the extra “e” on “the” made her classy. Maybe there is a place for fat, unrefined, sexually explicit women in the entertainment world to be gross, uncouth, and sexually explicit? I mean how else to you describe her rise to artist of the year? 

I’ve gone on about this sort of thing before so I won’t take up too many pixels doing it again, but really? Why? Why are we subjected to such? At least when Sasha Baron Cohen is being gross we can choose whether to go see his movies. I guess the same is true for Megan. 

Okay, moving on. 

There were some interesting pre-recorded segments both singing and interviews.

BTS did a video for the show. I think I need to work on my boy band wink at the camera sexily move.

Harry Stiles in boa and butterfly tat? Really?

The opening was good. Artists sitting on stage and each in turn getting up to perform. The Black Pumas were interesting. I had never heard of them. They had a good back story and I wanted to hear more about how the two men that form the backbone of the group came together. I expected a more funky James Brown kind of beat from them.

Billie Eilish (part of her real name) did a good number. Later on the show did a video about her and she described being in a rather dark place, and bad circumstances and in the video she said she asked herself what she could do to make something out of this negativity. (I’m misquoting but I think I’ve got the idea.)

Bruno Mars (Not his real name) did a great 70s style song and later he did a terrific Little Richard number. 

Taylor Swift (her real name) got nothing all night long, then came Album of the Year. Boom. I also read her backstory in Wikipedia. I knew some of it but not all. 157 weeks for her first album on the Billboard top 200? Yeah. Also, she got the opportunity to open for Rascal Flats after they fired Eric Church as their opening act for playing too long. He had said that when she got her first gold record she should give it to him, and she did! With a note that said “Thanks for playing too loud and too long, Taylor.”

Meanwhile, Covid is still a thing, and hopefully people will realize we got to keep on doing what we’ve been doing if we want to defeat this virus.

Joe Biden is continuing to lead. Satan and Republicans are criticizing, blaming, and trying desperately to take credit.

The law may be moving in on you know who. It seems he’s feeling the heat. I do hope he’ll try his “everybody knows” and “a lot of people are talking” as his defense in court. 

I would also like to see a black person stand real close to Ron Johnson. I wonder if he could take it. I mean. Oh wait, maybe we should have a few … no, never mind.

The Grammys were interesting. There was nothing spectacular and there was a lot that was better left unsaid.

Trevor did a masterful job.

PS WAP WAP A LOO BOOP!

Sunday March 14, 2021

As we see the number of people arrested and charged in the Jan 6^th Insurrection grow we also see the fabrications and denials by the right increase. The situation is absurd, but those are the times we live in. I don’t think when you are gaslighting yourself it counts as gaslighting. I think that’s either lying or denying reality (at a minimum.)

Ron Johnson the Republican senator from Wisconsin is the most glaring example. Saying that he could look in the protestors eyes and see they were patriots, but if it had been BLM and Antifa then he would have been scared. Does it get more racist than that? Yes, yes, it does, but you gotta go some distance for that to be true.

There is no reasoning with such people. They must be removed from positions of power and never let back in. 

Meanwhile, rumors circulate that Satan could be charged in New York any day now. Specifically in Manhattan, one has to specify as there are two ongoing investigations in New York.

The other day we flipped to the Olympic channel and watched some slalom skiing and some halfpipe competition. One of the announcers was talking about the second tier of skiers, those people who are placing 4^th, 5^th, or below. Always in the hunt, but never breaking through. The problem for them is that after awhile they begin to doubt themselves and then they try to do something different and it makes it worse and they fall farther back. 

I watched a little of both the women’s and men’s competitions in both sports. There is a difference between those in 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd and the rest. It is a notch different, but it is noticeable even to one not skilled in the sports. 

We were entertaining ourselves trying to figure out the difference in the spins and the grabs in the halfpipe competition, because they all look about the same. One of the moves the announcer explained was difficult because you have to shoot up in the air and blindly reach back and hope you grab. Oh? Okay. I don’t think you’ll see me going flat out up the steep slope of something and shooting twenty feet in the air. Not gonna happen. (I’m thinking.)

Many of the people competing in the half pipe competition were born in this century. Egads. All the Japanese women were dressed the same in black with little wisps of hair coming out of either side of their helmet. 

All the competitors wear these big goggles with a sunshield on them so you have no idea what anyone looks like, except that before their run the TV puts up a picture of the person. They are all cute, good looking or both. 

The skiers tend to be taller and have more of an outdoorsy alpine look. This makes sense because, I realized, you could build a half pipe facility in or near a large urban area. This also explained why so many Japanese can compete in half pipe, but not skiing. 

We also watched some downhill snowboarding and I kept thinking about a picture in LIFE Magazine when some dudes in Colorado made two little mounds of snow and were doing back flips on skiis. How crazy was that? 

I also thought about when Billy Kidd was skiing and how everyone kept perfect form with their skiers locked together. Then came Franz Klammer. Skiis wide, arms flailing, he was all over the place. There was one turn where a camera was set up that saw skiers enter from the left, sweep around the gate, and exit to the lower left. The part towards the gate was almost horizontal. All the skiers came in tight, skiing in locked parallel form as they brushed the gate. Not Klammer, he swept the thing like a tornado, whirling way wide on the gate, almost losing control. You didn’t need a stop watch to see he was going faster than anyone else. 

That run changed the sport. It was Innsbruck 1976.

Then I think of Mikaela Shiffrin. She travels with 400 pairs of skiis and a guy who spends his time in a shed sharpening them. After every run they need to be sharpened. She can tell immediately if they aren’t right. Amazing.

Then I think about where we’d be if Satan had won the election. Do you think we’d be looking at the whole country being vaccinated? Or that we had already passed the 100 million shots? 

And I think of how this thing could have been contained in China a year ago, if we had had real leadership. Or if not there, then how it could have been so greatly reduced in its effect here. If …

But now there is hope.

Watching these young kids do their slope style 1080s and their back grabs twenty feet in the air give me hope.

PS Me and The Man at the Renwick

Extra Credit Quiz – Who’s the girl in pink. ( You know her name. It will kill you if you don’t get it. )

Saturday March 13, 2021

How many times in the last few years have you heard or said, “You can’t make this up?” Or “If you took this to Hollywood as a script they’d throw you out of the office.”

Yeah, well, the new normal seems to be trending toward the -not absurd – but the more absurd on one side of the ledger. On the other we have people in positions of power that are actually doing the job we would expect them to do. On the other we have people, who seem to be working in a concerted effort to undermine and get control of our democracy for their own ends.

Let me explain. You can see what is going on as random stuff, or you can look from a higher more dispassionate viewpoint. For instance, people have been praying and making offerings to gods for thousands of years despite to evidence that directly links their actions to what occurs, despite all the claims there is no casual link. Likewise some people will say that it is hard to believe that all this happened by accident, that there had to be someone or thing that designed and planned it all. To which I say, “No there doesn’t. It could just be random.” It’s hard to accept. But it’s still the best case, based on the evidence.

Now let’s look at what’s been happening here in the U.S. and ask my question again about randomness. Is it in fact random that all these Republican held legislatures are all of a sudden trying to pass laws that curtail voting based on a perceived threat that doesn’t exist? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to know that it is in some way coordinated. By coordinated I mean there is communication between these attempts, at some level.

Now to the conspiracy level…If there is a coordinated effort between these states to pass such laws who is behind those attempts? Who does it benefit?

I’ll let that lie for the rest of this screed, but I wanted to put it out there as a marker. Now, onto the bizarreness of today’s news and world.

Yesterday, Mike Flynn was back in the news. Yeah, former Director of Intelligence, convicted felon and four star general was being investigated. This time by the Army. They had been investigating him, but stopped while he was under criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Once Donnie pardoned him, he was no longer under investigation by the Justice Department so now the Army could proceed with their investigation. 

Seems they got some new information, or it just became public. Mike might be in hot water. Wow, what ever for? Seems you can be an agent of a foreign government, that means you can be getting paid by said foreign government if you are National security Advisor or if you are a recently retired Army general. Who knew? 

If accept money from a foreign government in exchange for information that this government thinks should be kept secret there’s a word for that. What’s that word? Oh yeah – SPYING. But Mike wasn’t spying was he? I mean he being paid by Turkey to improve their stature within the Trump administration. So what? Big deal. Oh, he forgot to tell anyone. That’s called being “an unregistered foreign agent.” That’s a no-no, or as some would say, “against the law.” Especially if you were a recently retired four star general in the army and especially if you are or soon would be The National Security Advisor. Those kind of activities would have to be disclosed on your national security form. He just forgot to mention it.

He also forgot to mention that  he was being paid by Russia.

You know what is so weird? There are pictures of him in Russia. Sitting across the table from Vladimir Putin at an event where he gave a speech. There’s a picture of him reaching out to shake Putin’s hand. So weird. He forgot to mention it. He also forgot to mention that he had been in contact with the U.S. Ambassador from Russia and was conducting U.S. foreign policy when he was not a member of the government. You know the came kind of crime that Reagan did and was never charged for, so I guess it’s okay.

We’ll see.

We’ll also see how his publicly taking the Qanon pledge, whatever that is, goes over with folks.

PS Chicken!

Friday March 2, 2021

Let me settle into my Alistair Cooke wing chair and look down into the camera.

“We are now at the point in our story …

“Ah yes. We are now at the point in our story where the Republicans are crawling out from under their rocks to claim credit for that which they actively aided and abetted in trying to stop. Now they wish to take credit for it.

“Meanwhile, they are doing their best to make sure that things like free and fair elections never happen again.

“Not only do they seek to keep the poor poor but to keep us sick and dying by actively encouraging the virus to spread via opening up too early their states and suing those who oppose such measures … “

The fact that they want to take credit for all the stuff in the relief bill that they actively opposed such surprise no one. They did the same thing when Obama was president.

Satan issued a statement saying he hoped people remembered him in regards to Covid and the vaccine. I remember. I remember you didn’t order enough vaccine, even when it was offered to you. I remember you refused to use the War Powers Act other than to force meat workers back to work under unsafe conditions. I remember that there was no vaccine held in reserve as you claimed. I remember that there was no roll out plan for the vaccine. Yes. I remember. Imagine where we’d be if you were still president? 

Not only are the “taker” states* opening up too early they are actively working to make sure the vaccine is being spread.

*”Taker States” – those states that always take more money from the Federal government than they put in, ie Wyoming, Mississippi…

Texas was the first to announce no more masks. Now the Attorney General is suing the Mayor of Austin because he wants to keep the mask mandate in place.

Florida is having Daytona Bike Week. Yeah baby. Wear a mask if you want but you don’t have to, up to you. Freedom!

Dr. Fauci said last night that soon we would be in a position to have small family gatherings. Several tens of thousands is not what he had in mind.

So let me ask these Republicans, “With over 90% of the country not vaccinated is it time to take off the mask?”

Is this their fabled idea of “herd immunity.”

Herd idiocy is more like it.

There’s an old joke about a person being hired to become a bank teller. They asked the person to count a stack of dollar bills and see if there were 100 bills in the stack. The person stopped half way through. When asked why they replied, “Well the first fifty were there so I figured the last fifty were too.”

Except for Republicans we need to update the joke. They only need to count to ten. Which is a good thing because after that you run out of fingers! (Ha ha. Get it? What? You thought I’d go West Virginia on ya? Nah, not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.)

OMG. Save me. 

Meanwhile, the stock market was listless a for a few days and then yesterday it exploded, right after Biden signed the relief bill. I don’t remember that happening after Reagan signed his tax giveaway or when Trump signed his. Remember those cots were only supposed to be temporary. What happened?

And quote of the day goes to Jen Psaki, “I’ll nerd out with you any day.”

Gauntlet thrown down (nicely).

PS Way Out Man!

Thursday March 11, 2021

I saw a picture yesterday showing a smug looking Paul Ryan when he and his fellow Republicans passed their $1.9 trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy. 

I also saw a reminder that not one Republican voted for the current $1.9 trillion dollar package.

Let’s not talk about other things. Let us concentrate on one thing and one thing only.

I the words of Maya Angelou, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Or I have heard that Satan’s favorite story was the one about the snake that asked someone to take him off the mountain where he had been sunning himself. It was getting cold and he would freeze up there. The person relented, picked up the snake and carried it down to a warmer climate. As the snake left the person he bite him. When the person dying from the bite asked why the snake replied, “You knew who I was and what I was before you picked me up.”

When Donald Trump passed that huge tax cut he told his rich friends he had saved them a lot of money, and he had! 

Believe them the first time.

FDR took his foot off spending in 1935 and he believed the banks would lend money he gave them. They didn’t and it led to the Great Depression* via the credit squeeze of ’35, because the banks didn’t lend out money (ie no credit for people.)

*Some think it was Black Friday in 1929 when the stock market crashed. That was bad, but it was actually the failure to lend money later that really hurt.

Obama bailed out the banks, gave them a ton of money, under the belief that the banks would in turn lend it out. They didn’t. They threw themselves big parties, moved the money overseas and then said they couldn’t find it.

Economics is pretty simple at the conceptual level. Figuring out what is actually going on, implementing it is the hard part.

We’ve seen forty years of Republican economics. Believe what you see. The rich get richer and everyone else suffers. 

Aside from being a hypocritical unpatriotic bunch of bought and paid for individuals … Did you see that the Senator from Mississippi (Wicker -R) is telling his constituents all the great stuff they are going to get because of the Biden Covid Relief bill passing? He failed to remind them that he voted against it!

This leads me to god and science. Any god, I don’t care which one, not one of them have shown that belief in them does any good. Yes, you may feel better, but did your god actually intercede and do something? The answer is, and always has been, “NO.” 

As science has moved forward to explain more and more stuff, god has retreated. We no longer throw babies into water and let them drown to make rain. Nor do we burn witches, or bleed people to make them well, etc. Etc. Etc. 

Look, if you want to believe in god, whatever god that’s fine. I just don’t want to pay for it. I want your holy places to be taxed. If it’s physical plant then it should be taxed. I don’t want to grant exceptions because of your beliefs. Be it that you believe you shouldn’t work on the sabbath, or you should wear a hat or a hijab, or that no one should get an abortion. If it’s your belief, it’s your belief and not mine. 

You want to talk rugged individualism? Don’t tell me what I should be doing based on your belief.

The Republicans have shown you over and over again who they are and what they will do. They will enrich their rich friends, they will take away your money and your rights. Believe them. 

They have shown you over and over again.

You don’t have to believe them, look at the evidence. Despite what they say the facts are clear. Trickle down economics doesn’t help you. It helps the rich. Hey, I have an idea. Let’s give money to the poor and let it trickle up!

Because well this is a really hard economic concept or two but here goes:

1. – The quickest way out of poverty is money.

2. – Giving more money to rich people doesn’t make the poor better off.

As to 1. above, how could the poor get more money so they wouldn’t be poor?

A. – We could let the rich “trickle down” some money. But any report I have ever read from waiters is that the rich are terrible tippers. Therefore I doubt it will work. That and every economic report I’ve seen since during and after Reagan points this out.

B. – We could pay the poor not to be poor. What would we call that? Hum, lemme think. Why not call it “I have to give you more money because the government won’t let me pay you less.” Too long. How about, “Increase the minimum wage”? Yeah, that’ll work. Now the question is by how much. That’s easy. All the economic advisers on those right wing talk shows tell you that your housing should be no more than 25% of your pay. So take the average rent in your area, figure out what 25% of that is and that’s the minimum wage for that  area. (I can hear those talk show host howling now!) ps Works out to about $35/hour most places.

C. – We could give the poor more money. What? Well, we’d do it with food stamps and cutting health care costs and added money for people with kids and like that there. What? It’s in Joe Biden’s plan that just passed? Who knew?

PS Virgin Bloody Mary with Shrimp